Balloon may be "brazen" China testing US defences, analyst says, as US stumped by latest flying objects

US military fighter jets on Sunday downed an octagonal object over Lake Huron, the Pentagon said. On Friday, an object was shot down over sea ice near Deadhorse, Alaska, and a third, cylindrical in shape, was destroyed over Canada's Yukon on Saturday.

An analyst who spoke to Reuters speculated that the balloon may have been a “brazen” attempt by China to test US military defences.

And a scholar of aviation who spoke to Reuters, while not drawing conclusions about China’s motives, put the balloon incident in the context of a rich history of militaries testing each other’s capabilities, as the U.S. and Soviet Union did in Cold War.

Since the Chinese spy balloon drifted into US territory and was shot down, US fighter jets have downed three more mysterious objects over North American airspace starting on Friday.

Kari Bingen, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Reuters that the sheer size of the balloon, at around 200 feet tall, and its trip across the United States, was a particularly “brazen” act by China.

China said it had no information about any of the three objects. Washington called the first object, the Chinese craft, a surveillance balloon while China has insisted it was a weather-monitoring vessel blown badly off course.

Bingen, the director of the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS and a former US undersecretary of Defense, speculated that China may be testing the waters with the balloon foray.

“Are they testing our response? Are they testing our military operational response? Are they testing our political response?” she asked.

“In a crisis or conflict would they use balloons, would they launch a barrage of balloons and forced us to figure out, do we target those and expend precious munitions on those or do we focus on the fight in the Indo-Pacific?”

The three objects downed this week, flying at altitudes of between 20,000 and 40,000 feet, were considered a risk to air traffic, White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said at a news briefing on Monday, although they did not pose a threat to people on the ground. They also were shot down because US authorities could not rule out that they were spying, he said.

Aviation scholar Michael Hankins of the National Air and Space Museum told Reuters that the kind of tit-for-tat accusations and high-stakes aerial drama of the last few weeks were parred for the course during the Cold war.

“There are some really fascinating stories about this kind of aerial reconnaissance aspect in the Cold War when you're talking about the Soviet Union, you know, looking at the US and vice versa,” said Hankins, who is Curator of US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps post-World War II Aviation.

The US would send up fake signals to see if Soviet radar would lock onto them or fly drones intentionally into enemy territory, “so they could see, you know, how well do we have to fly, how detectable does our aircraft have to be for the Soviet defences to be able to see us?”

Those tactics were important to gathering information that led to the development of new aircraft like stealth aircraft, he said.

“I'm not going to speculate about what China's doing, but the history of trying to figure out what the other side's capabilities are, that's something militaries have always done throughout time,” Hankins said.

The Chinese balloon triggered an uproar in Washington, shaking up the already contentious relationship between the world's two biggest economies and prompting US President Joe Biden's top diplomat, Antony Blinken, to cancel his scheduled trip to Beijing last week.

China on Monday widened its dispute with the United States over aerial surveillance, claiming that US high-altitude balloons had flown over its airspace without permission more than 10 times since the beginning of 2022. The White House denied the assertion.

Reuters